Sprint went a bit too far with Evo launch numbers

Mike Luttrell, 9th June 2010

Sprint "inadvertently" exaggerated the first-day sales of the HTC Evo 4G phone that went on sale last Friday, but it did still eclipse its own internal record for the most phones sold on launch day.

Sprint "inadvertently" exaggerated the first-day sales of , but it did still eclipse its own internal record for the most phones sold on launch day.

Yesterday, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said that Evo 4G launch day sales were greater than any other single-day sales of any of its phone in the US in the company's history.

There's no disputing that fact. When it launched on Friday, it sold more than twice the number of Palm Pre devices that were sold on its respective launch day. The Pre was the previous record holder.

However, Hesse went a bit out of bounds when he went on to say, "In addition, the total number of HTC EVO 4G devices sold on launch day was three times the number of Samsung Instinct and Palm Pre devices sold over their first three days on the market combined."

In turns out that wasn't true at all. According to Dow Jones, Evo sales when spanned out across its first three days were actually on par with the first-three-day sales of the Instinct and the Pre.

Sprint hadn't made a comment about the misspeak in the Dow Jones story, but the company does expect the Evo to become the top-selling phone in its portfolio at the moment.